[Agemegos]

I'm writing up a planet for FLAT BLACK, and I'd like to do a reaction check for the suspensibility of disbelief.

The sociological idea for the planet is based on the sacred kingship as copiously described by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. Basically, kings are sacred and everyone's prosperity depends on the continuance of their divine powers. If the king gets weak or sick things will go very badly. So the old king is shuffled off to the afterlife to sort things out with God, immolating himself or herself, or being sacrificed by a successor or torn apart by a mob, and a new king takes over. The old king's body may be eaten or used as a miraculous fertiliser.

In this case the planet in question is stagnating at late TL4 industrial development and productivity because it has lousy government, deficient infrastructure, bad schools, etc.. There are 1.4 billion people and at least tens of thousands of kingdoms that barely co-operate. It is in contact with a TL10 (advanced) interstellar economy, but no-one except the ruling families can afford much in the way of imports, and they use their imports to support their masque of divinity. Young aristocrats are sent off-world for training in management, agronomy, civil engineering, jurisprudence, medicine, forensic science etc. While they are away that are modified using biotech to have divine features such as beast's heads, blue or green skin etc. When they come back they are inducted as gods and take up posts in the government of their kingdoms in which they use their education and imported tools to work the routine miracles. Those the do well may be promoted by the local king. When the king gets the chop (or defects) the gods elect one of themselves to be the new king.

It's very hard for a visitor to tell whether the peasants really think that the gods are divine, or whether that's just their word for "aristocratic technocrat"; whether they think that their everyday gods work miracles, or whether that is just their term for "use fantastic high-tech skills and gadgets"; whether they think it is a dreadful sin to strike a god, or whether that is just their term for "capital crime". They certainly know that gods bleed if you prick them and die if you kill them, but say that that is normal and expected for gods.

Is this plausible in FLAT BLACK? In particular, is it plausible in the Core after a century of contact with the Empire? Would the gods flee, or reform themselves into a revolution? Would the Empire put up with it, of set the Public Education Service, Economic Advisory Service, and Social Engineering Advisory Service onto the place to fix it up?


In short, how's your SoD-meter taking this? Are you all like "Wow! That is so sick!"? Or are you all like "No way! That wouldn't last fifty years in the FLAT BLACK I know."?